DISQUS

joshnunn · 3 months ago

I don't mind so much that anyone would take comments away from my site, so much as make it more difficult for me to participate and respond to people. With discussion on Twitter and Friendfeed, buried in Google Reader, and in umpteen dozen annotation services, how do you even know if people are talking about your content? As far as I can tell, no single service currently available makes all of this visible to the site owner from one place. They must have dozens of accounts to track all the mentions their content gets just so they can have a conversation with the people who were interested enough to respond. It's over-distributed.

Louis Gray · 3 months ago

How do you know if people are talking about your content? Referral logs and search alerts. I don't find every conversation about my content, no doubt, but I sure do get most of it. BackType works great for this. Technorati and Google Blog Search are pretty good. Twitter Search and FriendFeed search are good too.

joshnunn · 3 months ago

But you just proved my point. There's no easy way to see it without multiple services. It's not a big deal I realise, and for someone who gets a lot of discussion like you do, a few missed ones here and there probably don't matter too much. I don't get much discussion though, and if I can't see it when it does happen (if ever) I miss a lot of opportunity to see what people think of what I'm saying.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 3 months ago

Your point is valid - there is no single service that will aggregate every comment on your content and deliver it to you in a nice bundle. If you really need that you'll have to work for it or pay someone else to.

Just be glad you've got the wherewithal to go out and find all of these mentions.

imma · 2 months ago

The problem is some of the conversations will be private & others will be on an obscure message board somewhere & some are even internal to online games.
Even just getting twitter comments is tricky

Richard Cunningham · 3 months ago

I think there are a few problems with blog comments that underlies most of these efforts.

Tracking replies to your own comments is pretty difficult as far as I know when you comment on someone's blog. Disqus, Digg, Twitter, FF, Hacker News essentially solve this problem by giving a place to check the replies. Many blogs now have an option to track replies via email which is less than ideal since it mixes the replies in with important stuff like email and many of the comment systems are not threaded so the 'replies' are not even replies anyway.

For people wanting to write tools that comment back on the blog, track conversations etc. then RSS is really suited to that.

In most cases it's not worth commenting on popular news sites because there are so many people there with out threading or comment voting you can't really have a good discussion there.

Louis Gray · 3 months ago

Notifications for replies to comments is pretty standard from Disqus and JS-Kit Echo. Interestingly, most of the other networks don't do a good job on checking for replies.

Your comment about commenting on popular news sites is no doubt right. The bigger they are, usually the uglier the comment stream.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 3 months ago

At the time that I viewed this post, Disqus had found 2 comments and 49 reactions, helping to track the conversations. And even if you're not using such a service, you could use a Backtype-like service, or even a simple Google/Bing/whatever search, to find reactions after the fact.

Regarding the argument that distribution itself takes money away from the original content provider, I see a parallel between distributed conversations and distributed music samples - if the content is good enough, people will seek the original out. As an example, I bought a Sarah McLachlan album after a last.fm user shared one of the songs in his feed. (That last.fm user happened to be Steven Hodson...)

Louis Gray · 3 months ago

I strongly believe that conversations everywhere drive traffic and interaction. I don't care for the page views and ads game, like many do. I embrace the conversation wherever it is.

As for Steven Hodson, he has fantastic taste in music, Sarah McLachlan aside. And he and I respect each other a great deal, even if we disagree on occasion. I like that cranky Canadian guy.

Alex Hammer · 3 months ago

"Here's the reality: Conversations have moved to where the reader wants them to be - and the best content creators shouldn't care if they get to have conversations on their content in any of these networks. The best content creators and the best Web brands shouldn't care about what people may say on their SideWiki, any more than they should panic over reviews that happen on Amazon's Marketplace or in the iTunes store. People are entitled to their opinions and their commentary, and any further efforts to try and force people to have these conversations in a single place should be extinguished."

I agree with Louis.

stu · 3 months ago

Louis,
Great discussion as always. As the author, you can go look for comments and look to engage, but as a reader, I am missing an opportunity to learn more through the Q&A. The concern that I have with the real-time nature of so many sites is that most of the dialogue and interaction is gone quickly. Your site captures the Tweets that link to the post, but any commentary or discussion on Twitter or FriendFeed are not linked to the article and are "gone" in a matter or hours or days. Seems that real-time conversations have a very short half-life...

Louis Gray · 3 months ago

Stu, real-time conversations do have a short shelf life. Most things do these days. When was the last time you went to a great blog post from a few months or few years ago and continued the conversation. It is moving quickly, and as much as we discuss and debate discovery, that action is a small percentage of those contributing.

kafkaz · 3 months ago

I was going to add my two cents, but another conversation is no doubt already unfolding or in the offing. And so it goes. Everything is an archive.

Josh Chandler · 3 months ago

Louis, it's certainly a great point you make on "real-time" moving fast. It makes me realise just how much we progressed to a real-time way of thinking way before the technologies of Friendfeed and JS-Kit Echo were in place on blogs!!

stu · 2 months ago

Isn't that small percentage where the best discussion is? If this topic isn't worth discussing after a week or a month, was it worth reading in the first place?
[thx for the response, just found it in my spam folder]

Renetto · 3 months ago

This Blog has been Sorffed.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 3 months ago

Sorffed?

gregorylent · 3 months ago

tech emulates the mind .. can't control others thoughts, why worry about control of "conversations"? that is just old-paradigm thinking being played out ..

joehobot · 3 months ago

Louis you made again some great point! :)

Btw what do you think about Google Notes? Wouldn't that be same as Sidewiki?

I am on your side :)
http://www.mwd.com/2009/09/whats-the-difference...

Dickie Armour · 3 months ago

Fantastic Blog Louis and so refreshing to hear the same exact point you raised at the seminar you held in London last week.

We have to go where the conversation is happening and if these happen or continue in comments away from my silo then I just go there to continue the conversation.

The very fact that you highlighted this nearly a year and half ago says something.

I'm pleased I'm fairly new to the whole world of social media and like most things the pace of it is moving almost too fast to keep it, but I've got my running shoes on and I'm trying!!

I agree with you and Mark. It's actually great if the comments spread elsewhere. I know and have confidence that this will eventually lead back to my website when the time is right and in the meantime I'll join the party wherever it's happening.

Chris Baskind · 3 months ago

If Google cared enough to ask, I won't mind allowing people marking up my stuff with SideWiki. I've started releasing my work with under liberal CC license, and what people say about it is their business. But that's my call. It may not be the preference of others, and calling them names ("old guard," etc.) isn't helpful.

> ... any further efforts to try and force people to have these conversations in a single place should be extinguished

That's not the issue. You're right: we can't force discussion venue, nor should we try. But content creators *do* get to say who can reuse their work, and The Google is essentially republishing anything they please within a new web service (they'll argue that there is no technical copying, but SideWiki wouldn't exist without the source content).

I'm wondering if SideWiki is creating derivative works without permission. We'll see what the courts think, because that is where this is going.

Someone made the bizarre assertion today that SideWiki "Shifts Power To Consumers –Away From Corporate Websites." The last I checked, Google was a massive corporation. What SideWiki does is move the conversation to *their* corporate website. Let's not confuse SideWiki with actual altruism, or Google with Robin Hood.

This is also not equivalent to DISQUS and Echo, both of which are attached to sites by the publishers themselves.

Louis, you know I'm a fan. I don't particularly have it in for Google. But the issues surrounding SideWiki are not simple. They'll be decided by the judicial system, not commenters.

doke01 · 3 months ago

Everyone is assuming Google is going to be successful with this because they are Google. This idea has been tried over and over by other companies and individuals and has always failed. Disqus has solved the problem. Google should just buy Disqus and dump the Sidewiki garbage.

David Sanger · 3 months ago

Understood, but not everyone has Sidewiki, (like those of us on Safari) and it would be nice to easily bring in selected comments to one's site, perhaps via the AP, to redisplay them

Hameedullah Khan · 2 months ago

I am sure Disqus will soon start showing sidewiki reactions too. Agree that best content creator shouldn't care where the conversation is going on.